Declarations of Dependence

Rethinking Freedom in America and the World
A collective intervention by leading theorists and historians reconceptualizes freedom in relation to dependence, obligation, and historically structured social relations.
At once critical theory and manifesto, Declarations of Dependence reclaims dependence as a site of unrealized emancipatory possibility. Bringing together a roster of leading public intellectuals - including Alyssa Battistoni, Katrina Forrester, Samuel Moyn, and Gabriel Winant - the volume argues that genuine freedom begins not with self-sufficiency, but with acknowledging what we owe one another. Across a wide range of perspectives, the book opens a new conversation about what it means to be free, tracing freedom's entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, gender, race, nature, and democracy.

As a social condition, dependence has been scrubbed from the historical record; as a normative concept, it has been degraded and shunned. Yet contemporary life is increasingly structured by dense forms of mutual reliance that ideals of independence can neither explain nor sustain. Against these limits, Declarations of Dependence asks what alternative understandings of freedom have been foreclosed. The essays gathered here insist on dependence as a social fact of modern history, a powerful lens for understanding the present, and a normative concept capable of orienting a new emancipatory horizon. The book will appeal to readers interested in mutual aid, care, affect, social reproduction, and other efforts to rethink freedom through relations of interdependence.

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